The Real Romney (12 page)

Six days later, on her thirty-second wedding anniversary, Leola recorded the shock of the shooting of Robert F. Kennedy in California, where she and her husband had lived. “It’s a horrid climax to a horrible experience here in France,” she confided to her diary. The standstill in Paris had become excruciating. There were, she wrote, no “trains, metro, planes, buses.” She felt as though she were sitting “on top of a smoking powder keg.” In the following days, Romney finally made his way from Bordeaux to Paris, joining the Andersons at the mission. By mid-June, the strikes had subsided and gasoline became available. Duane Anderson seized the opportunity. He wanted to leave Paris and visit missions in the south that had been experiencing difficulties. He would take Leola along. Mitt, the newly arrived assistant to the president, would be their driver.

[ Four ]

A Brush with Tragedy

This made me very painfully aware that life is fragile . . . and that what we do with our time is not for frivolity but for meaning.

—MITT ROMNEY

T
he call from the new, untested leader of the local Mormon congregation had been urgent: “President, President! Two old women have become angry with each other, and the branch is choosing up sides! What do I do?” The spat, in the city of Pau in southern France, demanded the strong hand of Duane Anderson, who promised a swift departure from Paris. “Hang on,” he said. “We’ll be right there.”

On their way south, Romney, Anderson, and the others stayed overnight in the city of Angoulême, arriving late on June 15, 1968. They found an empty parking lot next to the Grand Hôtel de France and left their Citroën DS for the night. Only the next morning did they realize why it had been vacant: this was where the outdoor market set up. Vendors’ stalls surrounded their car. They were trapped. Anderson figured they’d have to wait hours to leave. But Romney had an idea. “Do you have a hundred francs on you?” Romney asked Anderson. He did. Romney changed the bill into five-franc coins. Then he waded into the market, announced
“Il nous faut partir!”
—“We must go!”—and used the coins to grease their escape. Before long, the Citroën was back on the road.

After setting things straight in Pau, they headed back to Paris. Romney, Anderson, and Anderson’s wife, Leola—everyone called her Sister Anderson—climbed into the front seat. In the back were David L. Wood, a twenty-one-year-old from Salt Lake City, and a Mormon couple from Bordeaux. Passing through the village of Beaulac, in a verdant landscape known for its fine vineyards, they came upon the aftermath of a serious car accident. A thirty-four-year-old man had smashed into a tree and been thrown from his vehicle. Police were still on the scene. Romney stopped to remove a roof rack lying in the middle of the two-lane highway, then continued on. The travelers, after pulling away, shared their fears of driving in France and what a white-knuckle experience it was. “We were all talking about how dangerous the highways were,” Romney said.

At that moment, a Catholic priest in a Mercedes passed a truck at high speed, missed a curve near a post office, and smashed nearly head-on into their car. The collision collapsed the front of the Citroën, thrusting the engine into the front seat. Romney was pinned between the steering column and the driver’s door. He was knocked out and trapped in the bloody wreckage. “It happened so quickly that, as I recall, there was no braking and no honking,” Romney said. “I remember sort of being hood to hood. And then pretty much the next thing I recall was waking up in the hospital.” They were driving slowly, but the other car had come at them in a flash, said Suzanne Farel, who was in the backseat. “My husband was the only one that got out of the car, and he went to get help,” she said. Duane Anderson reached to cut the ignition. “Leola was slumped over beside me, and I tried in vain to arouse her,” he later wrote in his wife’s journal. Ambulances ferried the injured to a hospital in nearby Bazas, a small town famous for a grand medieval cathedral and a breed of choice cattle.

Romney’s injuries appeared so severe that a police officer who responded to the scene made a grave notation in the young man’s passport:
“Il est mort”
—“He is dead.” In fact, Romney was unconscious but still breathing. Rescuers had to pry him out of the Citroën. When news of the crash reached Romney’s parents, the details were thin. They were told he had survived but didn’t know much more. George contacted Mitt’s would-be bride, Ann Davies, inviting her to the Romney home as the family waited and prayed. “I remember the call coming in,” said Jim Davies, Ann’s brother. “I remember the shock of it.” Duane Anderson was seriously injured, but he survived. His wife, Leola, who had been sitting between her husband and Romney, was not so lucky. Crushed by the impact, she lived for two and a half hours, dying in the hospital after unsuccessful attempts by the doctor and nurses to keep her alive.

T
he days that followed, Duane Anderson would later say, were “a blur of pain.” Word of the accident spread quickly through the Mormon world. Help began arriving within hours. Under instructions relayed to Paris from Salt Lake City, where church leaders were deeply worried, missionaries Joel H. McKinnon, who was Anderson’s senior assistant, and Byron Hansen, the mission secretary, left Paris at midnight and drove through the rain, arriving in Bazas at 8:30 a.m. the day after the accident, according to Hansen’s journal entry, which began, “Tragedy struck last night.” Hansen recalled, “When we initially arrived, they thought Mitt had been killed.” McKinnon and Hansen had to inform Anderson that his wife had died. The doctors had declined that somber task.

From the United States, George Romney took charge of his son’s care. He asked a son-in-law, Bruce H. Robinson, a medical resident then married to Mitt’s sister Jane, to fly to France and oversee Mitt’s medical treatment. “I was making rounds that afternoon in Michigan, and George Romney called me and said, ‘Mitt’s been in a fatal car crash; he’s survived so far, but we don’t know the extent of his injuries,’ ” Robinson said. The family was also worried that French doctors would not know of Romney’s allergy to penicillin. Robinson called his wife, who met him at the Detroit airport with a toothbrush and clothes. He flew through the night to Paris and then to Bordeaux, arriving on June 18. “Mitt was just coming out of his coma, but his face was all swollen, his eye was almost shut, and one arm was fractured,” he said. As can happen after head injuries, Robinson said, Romney’s breathing and heart rate had slowed, making them hard to detect and leading to premature declarations of his death. Lacking tests that exist today, the emergency medical personnel did what exams they could, finally establishing that he was going to pull through. He nearly did not. “He probably came within a hair of not surviving,” Robinson said. In the days ahead, Romney recovered quickly and without surgery, benefiting from his youth and general good health. His emotions, though, were a muddle: he was in shock, profoundly grateful to be alive, and grieving Sister Anderson’s death.

The driver of the Mercedes that hit them was a forty-six-year-old priest, Albert Marie, from the village of Sireuil. He had been traveling with his mother and another woman. Romney said the truck driver whom Marie passed estimated Marie’s speed at about 120 kilometers per hour, or about 75 miles an hour. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, having experienced a variety of run-ins with the French government over the previous century, was reluctant to inflame tensions with French officials or the Catholic Church by going after Marie. “Duane Anderson refused to press charges because he didn’t want there to be difficulties between the two churches,” said André Salarnier, a French Mormon who was living in Bordeaux and rushed to the hospital after the accident to help. David Wood said he remembered receiving some kind of settlement, but Romney has no such recollection. Romney has said he believes there was a criminal proceeding against Marie and that he recalls filling out an affidavit. But neither Romney nor the police in Bazas still have records from the case.

By all accounts, Romney himself was driving cautiously that day and deserved no blame. “We were conservative—he was below the speed limit,” Wood said. Romney, asked how fast he was driving, said, “Oh, yeah, I was probably going less than the speed limit, so far as I know.” Richard B. Anderson, a son of the Andersons who was twenty-seven and attending graduate school at Harvard at the time of the accident, said he does not hold Romney responsible at all. “Mitt was not in any way at fault,” he said.

Duane Anderson, the church’s top man in France, faced a long emotional and physical recovery. His chest had been crushed, his ribs and wrist were shattered, and his liver and spleen were damaged. After a few days in the local hospital, the church rented a private train car to transport him back to Paris. When they arrived at the mansion that served as the mission home, Romney and Robinson helped Anderson, who was confined to a wheelchair, up to his bedroom by an elevator. When he entered the room, the full weight of what had happened finally hit him. “He became hysterical with grief,” Robinson said. “I had to put my arms around him, and Mitt did, too, as he sobbed uncontrollably.” Anderson wrote a few months later, “I felt that the world had come to an end and there was nothing left to live for. Every cell in my body screamed with anguish.”

For Mitt, the fatal accident was a turning point. He was still a young man, twenty-one years old, with a young man’s sense of his own invincibility. Now Sister Anderson, who’d been giving him advice on his love life shortly before the crash, was gone, a brutal lesson in man’s impermanence. Romney, as he sorted through his grief, would also see his responsibilities in the mission grow. “It was a very difficult and heart-wrenching experience to lose someone that I respected and admired, and to see someone who I loved—the mission president—lose the love of his life,” Romney recalled. “It is still a tender spot in my heart.”

C
hurch leaders called J. Fielding Nelson, the president of the Mormon mission in Geneva, Switzerland, with a pressing request. France was on its own, they told him, a disparate network of two hundred or so young missionaries with no guiding voice. Duane Anderson was returning to the United States to heal and to bury his wife, and it wasn’t immediately clear when he would return. So Nelson, as the closest church elder, was asked to pack his bags and go to Paris. He did not know what he would find.

A mission president is like a father figure, responsible for scores of vulnerable, often immature young adults in a foreign country. Any number of problems could arise. The missionaries could crash their scooters or bicycles and need medical care. Their pairings with other Mormons for door-to-door proselytizing could turn volatile. A loved one might die while they were away. And then there were the frequent forceful rejections to their evangelizing. In France, the social upheaval of 1968 added yet another complication. Through it all, it fell to the mission president to hold things together and keep the missionaries safe. “The Lord, and those parents, are trusting you with their kids,” Nelson said. “You’re responsible for them.” But when Nelson arrived in Paris, he found no such disarray. The two young leaders, Mitt Romney and Joel McKinnon, still nursing their injuries and their grief, had stepped into the vacuum to manage the enterprise. That meant giving missionaries assignments, overseeing the financial operations and other administrative aspects of the mission, and helping people in the field deal with whatever problems arose. “You had this shock experience that affected all of us emotionally, but the work had to go on,” said fellow missionary Dane McBride. “You saw this exceptional leadership in Mitt to inspire, uplift, bring people to focus, remember what they’re about.”

Indeed, it was in this period, in the latter part of 1968, that glimpses of Romney’s capacity to lead first began drawing notice. Those who worked with him remember a young man who took on the demeanor of someone much older. He resisted suggestions that he return home to recuperate, believing he owed it to the mission to stay. He was back at full speed in a matter of weeks. “His resilience was truly astounding,” McKinnon said. “He didn’t seem to be particularly pensive or particularly concerned about the accident, as to what had happened to him and how close he’d come to death.” He was even, perhaps, too eager to work. McKinnon’s sole focus was keeping the mission functioning, but Romney saw the crisis as an opportunity to make some changes in how things were done. At times they clashed; McKinnon felt overwhelmed by Romney’s tide of ideas. “I just got to the point where I kept saying, ‘No, no, no,’ ” McKinnon said. “His mind did not rest.” But he admired Romney’s drive. “Mitt had the ability to just sort of see all the things that needed to be done and begin to figure out how to do them,” he added.

Inside, however, things were different. Emotions swirled in Romney’s head. He shared his feelings only with those closest to him, exchanging calls and letters with his parents. But he wanted to keep all of that from view, obscured behind a mask of resolve. It was an early glimmer of a trait that would shine brighter in his adult life: a fierce instinct to protect his privacy and keep others at bay. “I didn’t want to, if you will, carry to all of the people in France a posture that would suggest that I didn’t have the emotional strength and the spiritual confidence to carry on,” he said.

In the final months of his mission, Romney worked to transform everyone’s mourning into something more constructive. He called on all the missionaries to make an extra effort in their proselytizing, to recognize the sacrifice the Andersons had made. “We put our shoulder to the wheel,” he said. Duane Anderson returned in August 1968 with his son and his son’s family, describing the mission home as “painfully lonely.” He commended Romney and the others for “carrying on beautifully in our absence through some very trying times”—citing one missionary who had suffered an emotional breakdown and had to return to the United States and another who had committed an unspecified transgression and been excommunicated from the church. Despite Romney’s new stature within the mission, he did lose one small battle after Anderson settled back in. He objected to the amount of garlic the mission home’s Spanish chef used for daily meals and lobbied for less, but the Andersons pulled rank and backed the chef. The garlic lovers won.

In his final months in France, Romney helped accelerate the number of conversions credited to the mission. He personally brought few new members into the church over his two and a half years. But his leadership helped the church achieve its goal of two hundred new recruits in what had been a challenging year. He found inspiration in the story, a parable really, of a Utah chemist, Henry Eyring, who, hobbled by cancer, had nonetheless once struggled to help his church weed an onion patch, only to learn that the row he had worked on didn’t need weeding. The mistake didn’t bother him, though. “I wasn’t there for the weeds,” Eyring said. “He came to respond to the call of service,” Romney said, “and I think that’s what happens to young men or young women who go on a mission.” Indeed, the closing months of his mission brought Romney closer to the faith his family had helped build. He had matured, both as a man and as a Mormon, and, following the accident, was able to see more clearly that he desired to live a life of purpose. “This made me very painfully aware that life is fragile, that we’re only here for a short time and that life is important,” he said, “and that what we do with our time is not for frivolity but for meaning.”